I’ve often wondered if it’s no coincidence that the people who wouldn’t listen to anybody else were also MAGA fans. The bar to entry is “don’t be a complete asshole”: failing that seems pretty sad. I don’t think it’s representative, but that’s mainly because some of my favorite people are die-hard conservatives. Then again, I don’t think they’re Trump fans. Hm.
What a wonderfully naive thought process you have. 
I do tend towards being a Pollyanna. You’re misidentifying optimism as naivety. Some sort of government needs to exist. We fund our society somehow. We need rules to protect against predators somehow. We want the best contributions out of every citizen. Not everything is going to work, and maybe you fix it better. Throwing up your hands and letting us succumb to runaway victory by the wealthy/elites seems bad. Letting the current societal winners check out and let everybody else starve seems bad. We’re in this together: we and our government should act like it.
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Our government was running just fine when it was small and didn’t need more money from income taxes.
However as you’ve been conflating “providing free services” with personal rights. You want the government to provide more of these services that our economy can not handle. Many of these free services wouldn’t be needed if people kept more of their own money to begin with.
Or the government getting involved in issues that it shouldn’t be and thus needs more taxes to pay for its involvement.
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Just to name a few:
- Lottery Tax
- Property Tax
- Leagalize MJ and tax that.
- GST tax
There are numerous ways of funding shit without the need of an income tax.
America did just fine for the first 100 years of its life without an income tax. After the Civil War was over, Lincoln abolished the first income tax in America - which was used to fund the war. What does that tell you?
If the Founders were alive today, they would abolish the Federal Income Tax immediately.
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This is a fallacy because even if people kept more of their money, the cost of living is much much higher than it used to be and wages haven’t kept up with that. There are also less jobs in certain sectors because rampant capitalism allowed corporations to ship a lot of jobs that used to be here overseas. So now you have a lot of people who have a hard time finding work, and thus, have little to no income because they have to work menial jobs that don’t pay much. So what do they? In addition to that, our country’s infrastructure is a lot bigger than it used to be and as such you’re going to need more money to maintain it.
I think you have this mental picture of welfare queens with 10 kids sponging off the state, and while I’m sure they exist, that was a canard sold by the Republicans in the 80s that has been debunked a thousand times, yet people still believe it for some reason. Very few people WANT to be on government assistance but because our country is an every-man-for-himself type place, you’re going to have winners and losers. Suck it up. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Those taxes will only pull in a fraction of the budget that income tax will. You’re committing the same logical fallacy that Shinji is because you’re trying to compare the present day to a time when the country’s population was much smaller, much more monocultural, and had much much less infrastructure to maintain.
I don’t love paying my income taxes, but the amount I pay is really not that much considering what I make. And there are a lot of things that I consider a waste of money, like the outrageous military budget we have, but I understand that my money is going to be put to things I don’t necessarily like and that’s just a condition of being in a society and contributing.
I would also bet that Lincoln abolished the income tax as a means of bringing the South back to the table. You had a whole region of the country that was devastated after the Civil War and so abolishing the income tax was probably much more a political move then a Libertarian one. But I guess we’ll never know.
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^-- yeah, that
If the founders would immediately abolish the federal income tax, then they’re fucking idiots because you have to replace it with something. S_A generally points to regressive taxation as a solution, which just seems like a boring beat-to-death discussion at this point.
Many of these free services wouldn’t be needed if people kept more of their own money to begin with.
… Sure, let the poor people keep more of their monies if that’s the problem. Go look up current economic disparity, though. Then figure out how to deal with runaway victory by the wealthy. We don’t need dynasties.
Let me reword that - “not immediately, but it would be of the utmost priority, were the Founders to see the America of today.”
Taxes were the reason for the American Revolution in the first place. The America you see today, is because of taxes.
@TheDoctaMario
I was just giving those as examples but that wasn’t really my point. My point is:
You defend income tax because you say it is necessary to fund shit. I don’t defend income tax because of the TRUE reason for its implementation. Do you know the TRUE origin and purpose of the Federal Income Tax?
"…it is wrong to file and pay a tax which the law does not require you to file and pay. It is an implementation of one of the planks of the Communist Manifesto, meant to enslave and destroy the middle class. Once I discovered what this was, and once I had done a complete and thorough research of the law — and believe me, I have researched it more thouroughly than anybody that you could possibly imagine — and when I found out there is absolutely NO LAW, which makes me liable to file and pay the income tax, I stopped filing and I stopped paying.
Not to get out of paying the tax. If I had found a law which said that I was required, made liable to file and to pay, I would be the first one in line every year to make sure that I paid…
…
…and as a matter of principle, if there is no law that anyone in this nation can find, that requires me or makes me liable to file and pay the income tax, as a matter of principle, I cannot and will not file or pay it. And anyone who does file and pay it, who also cannot find any law anywhere that makes them liable to do that is a coward."
http://laissez-fairerepublic.com/tenplanks.html
The Ten Planks of the Communist Manifesto
1848 by Karl Heinrich Marx2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
The 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, 1913 (which some scholars maintain was never properly ratified), and various State income taxes, established this major Marxist coup in the United States many decades ago. These taxes continue to drain the lifeblood out of the American economy and greatly reduce the accumulation of desperately needed capital for future growth, business starts, job creation, and salary increases.5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
The Federal Reserve System, created by the Federal Reserve Act of Congress in 1913, is indeed such a “national bank” and it politically manipulates interest rates and holds a monopoly on legal counterfeiting in the United States. This is exactly what Marx had in mind and completely fulfills this plank, another major socialist objective. Yet, most Americans naively believe the U.S. of A. is far from a Marxist or socialist nation.
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“The people who are having a hard time right now are middle income Americans.”
You don’t have to replace it with anything. Cut the spending. Cut both the military spending and entitlements.
Sadly you want more taxes. My state is thinking of increasing vehicle registration from 101 per vehicle to over $500. Because more taxes solve everything right?
$500 dollars just to tell the state that I still have the same car as last year. Cali tried that too from what I hear.
the reaction of a federal judge when tax protesters try argue that in federal court. it’s too bad posessing a misguided belief didn’t help wesley snipes and other tax protestors in court over the years.
is that the conspiracy theory involving a secret plan to create an artificial extraterrestrial threat in order to create a one world government or a different one? also, why blame wilson and not the incompetency of the taft administration? the taft administration proposed the 16th amendment. it was a cynical proposal because the administration believed it would fail only to watch their scheme blow up in their faces.
so your plan is to fund the government is replace the income tax with:
1 & 3) two new regressive taxes.
2) i’m sure that states are going to love that new tax.
3) if the GOP controlled congress wouldn’t pass BAT because the at large GOP membership, corporations and lobbyists hated and killed it. what makes you think they’re going to approve of GST.
i like how they believe that we’re what trump called," the highest taxed nation in the world". of course, like trump, these people never look at CBO numbers, OECD comparisons, etc. if they did look at them. they would know the numbers would paint a very different picture from what one hears from politicians and fox news.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/987463564305797126
Time to do something I haven’t done in 15 months and give Trump SOME credit but this also comes with the responsibility to own all the crap when it all implodes on him.
I will give Trump the credit he kind of deserves and his reckless talk worked.
Could also be:
-Sanctions have hurt North Korea economically
-North Korea is already good enough on the nuclear front and can start a nuclear war already anyways so no need to test
-North Korea is working with another country like Russia or China secretly and Kimmy is playing Trump
One of those kind of have to let it play out but as I have said to others trying to run with this and giving Trump the full credit is you can’t backtrack when it all falls apart and its one of the above and he is made to look the fool he is but yes for now he deserves some credit.
Why are we cutting entitlements? Per current economic trends, the rich are not paying enough taxes. You raise taxes first to maybe start cutting into the ongoing explosion of debt. Are you subscribed to the fear-mongering wherein because 1% of people fuck up entitlements that we should fuck the other 99%? If you apply that same logic to white collar crime don’t we want to seriously increase regulations?
You point to a car vehicle usage tax, which is a solid example of a regressive tax. Yes, that’s generally a bad tax to me as well.
S_A: linking together the American Revolution with a discussion about current taxes is delightfully wrong. You do you, but I don’t think that leads to any interesting discussions about the current American political landscape.
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The rich already pay more than their fair share. Its the bottom 50% that are contributing almost nothing in the way of taxes.
According to the IRS the 1% contribute to 36% of all income taxes. Top 5% pay 60%, top 25% The poorest 50% only pay 2%.
So no, it isn’t that the rich aren’t paying enough. Either the poor need to step up or we need to cut all major spending including military and entitlements.
How do the poor step up when they HAVE NO FUCKING MONEY.
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…
If a poor person making $10,000/year pays 100% of their income in taxes
and a rich person making $1,000,000 pays 10% of their income in taxes
then yes it is fair to say that the rich person contributes to 50% of all income taxes
but
it seems like a weird point to make
the poor need to step up…? figure out how, and make that the policy. OR, and this is a crazy thought, do the thing we already know how to do: adjust taxation so that there’s increased taxational friction on massive income. You can still make one thousand times what the average Joe makes, but you’re also investing more in the system that is making you rich.
I’m unclear why we’re pursuing some fever dream that the poor can step up further in some way we have not thought of yet when there’s already a pretty time-tested mechanism at hand.
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INB4 another Shin_Akuma copy pasta “taxes are still illegal” unga bunga post
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Once you go Barack you never go back… At least she finally looks happy and I have to say Obama could of shun her for pushing the birther crap but to be friendly with someone who has had to learn her man was with porn stars… he showed class here…
https://twitter.com/voxdotcom/status/987786801468370944
Great video. Worth the 7 minutes.
Well, now the first step has been done by giving companies the leverage to actually pay their workers more by easing on their taxes.
Now those workers have to step up themselves. Start making better financial choices in life, and prove to their employer that they’re worth more hours and possibly a promotion.
@preppy, it seems weird because its a counterpoint to your flawed idea that the rich don’t pay enough in taxes.
Then again, not all “poorest 50%” are making 10k a year. The 50% group itself is at 27k a year.
A better question is how does a 99%er only make $464 a year?
Preppy that “time-tested mechanism” is bankrupting our country. So apparently its failing and needs to be overhauled. Or does 20 trillion in debt not indicate to you that the system is failing?
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